Speaker 1: Hi, so today we're going to talk about Brandwatch, which is a social media listening software. It's different from a publishing tool like Hootsuite or Khoros. It is similar to a tool like Sysmos, if you've ever used that. Basically Brandwatch listens from across the web and it can gather social media posts or other publicly available data such as websites or news or blogs, and it pulls from the firehose of Twitter and Reddit, and it gives us access to a lot of data that is being publicly shared. So when you're ready and you want to start using Brandwatch, you just go to login.brandwatch.com, which will take you to the Brandwatch interface. And I should mention that Brandwatch is a consumer product, so it does require a license to access Brandwatch. If you don't have a login or access, there is a student license that's available for just $150, and that's an annual license. So I think it's worth it. This is one of my favorite tools to use to access social media data and gather unstructured data from the web. So we'll be working in the consumer research product. Brandwatch does have a few other products in their stack, but consumer research is where we will be exploring. And I really just want to introduce Brandwatch as a tool today. So first off, how do you pick a topic? You want to know what people are saying about a particular brand or a product or a person or a topic. For now, let's say we're interested in learning about REI. Many of you may be familiar with REI. It's an outdoor recreational company, and they sell recreational products. So one thing you can do in Brandwatch is do a quick search. And this will give you an idea of if people are talking about the brand or product. It gives us kind of a snapshot. And of course, you can adjust everything in Brandwatch. It's all interactive. So it looks like we are looking at about a month here. So we can expand this to include the full 30 days, I believe. We could look to see what people are saying today. And there's some other different areas here to gain insights just very quickly. But let's jump back to the main interface. So I'm going to walk through how to create a query, which is the basic search function in Brandwatch. It's kind of like creating a Google search. So we're going to say we'd like to create a new query. We're going to use the query editor, continue. And here's where you can begin typing a query. So one thing to think about is, do we want to look for a string of words? Or maybe we want to search just for a hashtag. For simplicity, I'm going to start with a hashtag. One of the campaigns that REI is well known for is called Opt Outside. So let's start with hashtag Opt Outside. Brandwatch will allow you to preview the results to make sure that, number one, it is pulling in data. And number two, you can kind of visually look through to make sure the information isn't too noisy. It is pulling in relevant information to your search. So it looks pretty good.

Speaker 2: Let's go ahead and move forward with this one. I'm going to say we're going to click next. Sorry.

Speaker 1: And we'll call this Opt Outside Campaign. You can adjust the date range here. I typically just put it back as far as possible to get the sort of widest picture of the use of this hashtag. And Brandwatch will go back two years. So I believe you can contact their sales team and access more historical data. But in the platform here, we're allowed two years of data. If you're searching for something, let's say something very, very popular, let's say we're searching for Google or maybe Trump, something that's very, very popular on the web, Brandwatch may give you a sample rate. But since Opt Outside isn't going past their firewall limitations, we are getting 100% sample rate. So as long as this says 100%, you're getting access to all of the publicly available data around this query. So now we've got the query set up. From here, what we can do is jump over to learn a little bit more about how this hashtag is being used. This is where we can get into all of the insights around this hashtag. And so I'll navigate over to the dashboards and I'll click new. And there's two dashboards that I like to create off the bat. And the first one is a summary dashboard. So we'll select our query, Opt Outside, open dashboard, and it takes a minute to gather all of the data.

Speaker 2: I'm going to go ahead and rename Opt Outside Summary, okay, 56, 72% and typically wait

Speaker 1: for this to get to 100% so that we are seeing all of the data, and then I reload it. And then we can take a peek at some of these data visualizations that are provided within Brandwatch's dashboard. Okay, so just off the top of this dashboard, we can see in the last seven days, there's been a little over 1300 mentions of Opt Outside, which is pretty good considering this campaign is normally running the Friday after Thanksgiving. I think they introduced this campaign because REI will shut down all of their retail locations and encourage their employees to opt outside and spend time with family outdoors. So this is pretty good considering it's not Thanksgiving this week. So one thing I'll point out right away is that we do have access to filters. So all of your data can be filtered. Right now we're looking at the last seven days by default, but we can expand this. Let's say, let's go back and let's look at November through January 21st. Let's see what we get. I'm going to go ahead and apply and that'll adjust our date range. So this would be a really good tool if I'm on the REI marketing team and I want to start planning for my Opt Outside campaign this year, or maybe we want to bring it in use as an evergreen campaign. So we see that there's over 58 or about 58,000 mentions, you can hover over this and it'll give you the exact number. And this was an increase of 257% from the previous period. You can see unique authors contributing. You can see the top trending topics, National Park, White Sands, Hot Springs. You can also see the top news stories here. And all of this again is interactive, so you can click into these to learn more about each example. Then you can see trends over time. Let me go ahead and delete this one so we can get a full picture here. Again we can filter this. I'm going to leave it actually as the seven days and show you a couple other features here. You can customize this so that you can adjust your y-axis or your x-axis. You can break this down by queries. Another really interesting sentiment and opinion mining tool that's provided right here within the dashboard is sentiment analysis or emotion analysis. And Brandwatch is using natural language processing and machine learning to measure sentiment and emotion in the conversation. So you can look at this by hours, but we can even break this down by minutes. So if you're interested in, it's giving me a warning because I need to be less than 12 hours to look at minute-by-minute data, but if you're interested in real-time conversation, this can be a great tool. Let me go ahead and adjust this. Let's do today. Oh, I need less than 12 hours. You can specify the exact time.

Speaker 2: So let's do six today to 15.

Speaker 3: Is that less than 12 hours? There we go. No?

Speaker 2: Okay. And I'm going to take it off emotion and just do sentiment, which will give us a little bit better picture.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's still a little limiting, but you can see how these tabs here work. A couple of other things I'll point you toward content and mention type here. You can adjust this to be original post only. So if you want to remove duplicates and only have original posts, that can be helpful. Let's expand this a bit. There we go. It's a little more interesting. You can also filter this out by channel. You can filter out by emotion. So maybe you only wanted to look at positive emotion, or maybe you wanted to look at the emotion of fear over a 30-day period. You can do some interesting filters here. And then, of course, all of this is exportable. You can export into Excel or CSV if you prefer to work with the data in a different format. And then let's go ahead and jump over to the other dashboard that I like to use. Create new and trends is another great dashboard that I would encourage you to look at. Here we can see things like categories or topics over time is another one. So this will actually break down. In the last seven days, we can see around this hashtag what people have been talking about. Nature, travel, road trips, hiking, Wisconsin, state parks, and let's see, Twitter buzz. We can see the last, or I should say the top stories, top hashtags, top tweeters. This is great if we're looking for influencers or opinion leaders within these searches.

Speaker 2: And then around the world, we can see where people are speaking about this hashtag. And there's different ways to adjust this as well.

Speaker 1: So if you want to adjust the visual display here, it's all interactive and customizable. So the last thing I want to leave you with, and again, this is just an introductory sort of training into Brandwatch and how you might use it in your research. The other area that as researchers, we find this really, really helpful. In the tools, you can actually export the raw data. So if you go down to downloads, Brandwatch will give you the ability to download the raw data associated with this query. So let's say opt outside campaign, last seven days. And I can go ahead and request the download. And that will give me a CSV of every single mention. And it will all be structured data. So it will have the post. It will have the date, the timestamp, the channel, the person who posted or the source for the publication. And a lot of other data that can be really useful when you are opinion mining or executing computational analysis. So I hope that this was helpful. Now you have an introductory knowledge of how to execute consumer behavior research using Brandwatch. And now you can go out and solve the world's problems. Stay tuned for more Brandwatch tutorials where I will talk about other useful applications of Brandwatch. How I like to integrate the platform with R and data analysis there. I'm also planning to share a little bit more information about how to access information that can be used for your methods section in research papers. So stay tuned or leave me a comment and let me know what topics you'd like to see covered. Thanks for watching.